The latest Roadrunner cartoon was on TV the other night, live from Dartmouth. You know the one. The Roadrunner, alias Hillary Clinton, swivels her head from side to side as the Wile E. Coyotes lined up beside her try to blow her up.

That's because Clinton is not just the Roadrunner but also the front-runner - the candidate who the polls say is solidifying her lead in the Democratic presidential race.

We viewers knew the plot - this is the Roadrunner, after all, and it wasn't exactly the first episode. The only question was what gadget Acme had sold those scheming coyotes this time.

Same old stuff, it turned out. Clinton had a crack at health care reform and failed. Meep! Meep! Clinton voted for the Iraq war resolution and hasn't apologized for her vote. Meep! Meep! Clinton won't give you a straight answer on Iran. Meep! Meep!

Of course, this Roadrunner episode was really just another presidential debate. And Tim Russert, the moderator, was on hand to see that all the candidates got the sharp end of the gotcha stick. He even skewered Dennis Kucinich, one-time boy mayor of Cleveland, who had 90 seconds to explain why the municipal electricity system went bankrupt on his watch.

But is this any way to run a presidential election?

No, it's not.

The reason presidential candidates need the New Hampshire primary campaign is to make them better candidates. They improve by hearing directly from voters. Over time, they shape their stump speeches and hone their messages. The candidates they become blend the experience they bring to the race, their ability to present themselves as leaders and the way listening to voters informs and changes them.

In the 2008 campaign, this sounds quaint, almost mythical. But not that long ago, it was literally true.

Now we've got a series of boring televised debates in which

most of the candidates listen to each other and cluster around the same positions. Afterward, media camp followers parse the nuances, analyze who nailed whom and move on to the next venue. If it's Tuesday, this must be South Carolina.

Of course, these are not really debates at all, and they are certainly not "historic debates," no matter how many times the TV announcers proclaim them to be. Before the Dartmouth event, the network showed clips from the first Kennedy-Nixon debate and pointed out that this was the 47th anniversary of that television milestone. What the announcer left out was that Kennedy and Nixon debated on Sept. 26, 1960, five weeks before the presidential election. Wednesday's debate was a year and five weeks before the election.

Some will say I am making a parochial case by arguing for giving the contenders time to develop their candidacies in New Hampshire. But I've been watching the campaign pretty closely, and I haven't seen any Democrat grow as a candidate.

For those whose poll numbers lag, the TV lineups are deadening. Chris Dodd has little chance to develop his case as the restorer of Americans' constitutional rights. Joe Biden, who is actually helped by the time limit on answers, has no opportunity to show that there might be a man behind the senator.

For the candidates higher on the charts, the debates are stifling. Maybe John Edwards never was going to flesh out his Kennedyesque call to the young to serve or his activist approach to governing. Maybe no amount of spending real time with voters was going to add substance and a human touch to Barack Obama's airy rhetoric. But the debates reduce them both to trying to score one on Hillary.

Single page